She is somewhere in the city
Somewhere watching television
Watching people being stupid
Doing things she can’t believe in

Pulp – Sheffield: Sex City

Ten months ago, I applied to be in a Hoopla Impro house team, then forgot all about it. I didn’t even turn up to the audition.

Oh well, my life was heading in a more not-Hoopla direction anyway. London, after all, is far away. And I was performing improv semi-regularly with AndAlso stuff around Brighton, and writing music with my band was taking up more of my creative energies. It wasn’t anything conscious, but the improv side of things down Sussex way soon started to fade away too.

Then, last month, I received an email saying I’d been cast in a Hoopla house team for a series of shows this autumn. Apparently I’d narrowly missed out before, which is why they were returning to me.

Cool. No further questions, your honour.

As I’ve written here before, I’ve always been a bit wary of improv. Or more specifically, I now realise: I’ve always been suspicious of people who only talk about improv. It does seem to attract a kind of earnest zeal seen rarely outside some of the more evangelical Christian denominations.

It’s fun on stage, for sure. Sometimes it’s even fun for the audience. But some people in this (I should stress, lovely, and frequently unproblematic) world want to talk about it off stage as well. 

All the time.

Or sort of do it, or a version of it, like a zany form of one-upmanship, even if you’re simply in the pub or trying to buy an off-peak return to Peterborough.

It can become trying.

So it was with some trepidation that I lurked outside The Miller pub at 1:30pm on Saturday, waiting to discover who my fellow teammates were to be.

It was an intense introduction: two hours of improv warm ups and games with Steve, Hoopla’s inscrutable figurehead, followed by a break for food and caffeine before straight in to our debut show. Steve – an excellent and enthusiastic teacher – arbitrarily split our group into two teams for the next couple of shows, but we’ll be mixed up again in future. 

One team was A-Ha, and ours was Bananarama.

Fortunately… everyone was really lovely. But not worryingly really lovely, like the Christian Union operatives who would go table to table at the Warwick Arts Centre in the late nineties. These people had a sense of irony, and an awareness of the Kool Aid dangers of this thing that definitely has cultish elements.

“I don’t know what’s next. I think I might attend a summer intensive course next year.”

“An improv summer camp? You’ll never be seen again.”

“I know. It could easily go full Waco”.

The show was good. Mainly performed to a few of our group’s friends and the other teams, on this rainy early Saturday night. I don’t remember much of it. Improv for me is strangely thoughtless – a trance, in which I just react to whatever happens around me.

At one stage I was a frog, and then, a horse. Suddenly we were all horses. Even writing this is ludicrous, but improv at its heart is letting go, but without quite the same danger as clowning, because it’s the job of everyone else in the team to make sure you look good. You’re never alone, and you never quite hit the floor.

It’s an interesting experience, but maybe this is why there is that kind of stunted eagerness to it. At its best, it’s euphoric that you’re being allowed to do this at all, and that maybe all adult life, with its zany rules and hierarchies, is the true silliness. You’re playing – that’s the point. And no one is getting humiliated – that’s also the point. It’s freeing, but there’s a safety net. And, you know, I’m a socialist. I like safety nets. I like people being there for each other. Each according to their ability, each according to their scene, as I believe Marx said.

So why do I sometimes want the liberation of clown-esque utter failure?

More thoughts when they occur to me, but I’m deffo enjoying it, and hopefully something more memorable – incredible, or awful – will happen in the show for me to write about next time.